On the Camino to Santiago

Yes, there was wine involved. Obviously.

When I say I walk a lot, people think it’s cute. It takes me saying I’ve completed a 900km-and-something hike for them to raise an eyebrow.

I can’t remember precisely when the slightly crazy idea came to me. I think I was slowly coming towards the end of my PhD and realised I had never taken a break. Some people take a gap year after school or go backpacking for a few months before they start university or before starting graduate studies. I had gone through literally four and a half degrees (I own half a Masters in romance languages due to circumstances that would be too long to explain here) and never done anything remotely similar. All my trips had been pretty civilised. No rough sleeping or hitchhiking. No experimenting with dangerous substances in Phuket.

In all honesty, this did not particularly appeal to me. I value my comfort above most things. I used to be the child who wrinkled her nose and said ‘ew’ to anything involving rolling in the mud (seriously, why) and my girl scout days amounted to half an afternoon and coming back home to say ‘never again’.

Yet while I was nearing the end of my degree and a full-time, non-academic, spending-the-rest-of-my-days-in-office job loomed on the horizon, I calmly assessed that I needed to have some kind of break/escape, or I would find myself in full breakdown two years down the line.

It wasn’t just the need for any kind of escape, though. Once I started looking into it, it became unthinkable not to do it.

I often get this overwhelming sense that there is something I must do. It’s not always rational, but I have never regretted following through.

In this case, it just seemed to make sense. I love walking. I couldn’t think of anything better than just doing that all day, with beautiful scenery and nature around me. At first, I even considered starting from home (also because the Camino happened to go through my Belgian hometown, which seemed like a sign from the universe). This would have been a three-month journey.

Another sign was the Camino going through Spain and ending up in Galicia, which is where my mother was born. While the Camino appealed to me much more than other paths because of its spirituality, these — almost tailored- ties to my personal history were what made it so irresistible to me.

I think other people saw it as a cheap cultural holiday, or a physical challenge, or a never-ending party road trip. It was never this to me. I would have done it if there had been nothing but nature and albergues on the way, and if there had been no one but me (in fact, my introvert self sort of relinquished that idea). At the beginning, it was meant to be exactly what it‘s supposed to be: a pilgrimage, ie., a long, reflective, purifying endeavour.

It is often said to try and lower, or even get rid of any expectations about what the trip will bring you. This is because so many people start with very high expectations of some kind of ground-breaking revelation that would descend upon them as they step into the city of Santiago, and get disappointed as a result.

There was nothing of the sort. And that was ok. As the cliché goes, it is the journey that matters, and the change happens with small, incremental, yet consistent steps forward.

Instead, the Camino brought me things I didn’t even know I needed.

I had set out on the journey without really knowing what I was looking for at the end of what was, after all, basically just a very long walk. To get better at directions, perhaps? At being practical? To reflect and meditate in silence and solitude? To find God again, and my way back to a faith that tended to become more elusive as the years went by?

Yet the most striking part of the Camino had nothing to do with any of this.

It was the people.

Strangely, I had barely given any thoughts to the fact that there would be others. It generally makes me uncomfortable to think of people doing the same thing as me. I thought the whole point was introspection and solitude, thus avoiding other human beings as much as possible.

I was missing a pretty important feature of pilgrimages: the point is not, unlike in many areas of life today, to find a new, original track off the beaten path. The point is precisely to go through the same path as hundreds of thousands of people before you. Bearing on our shoulders with the self-conscious weight of centuries of socio-cultural significance, the Camino was there to remind us of the intrinsic sharedness of our human condition, and that compassion, not competition, is what distinguishes humanity among the living.

A few tips for those who might be tempted

1. Don’t try to plan everything. The trip is about being spontaneous and letting go of control. You don’t always know where you’ll end up spending the night, and that’s fine. I started with a very strict schedule then realised that there was a host of possible disruptions I hadn’t taken into account (injuries, albergues being full, etc.). Also, sometimes I would simply get to a beautiful place and want to stay there, even if there were a few km left on my daily plan, or the reverse. Being spontaneous allowed me to discover amazing places and wonderful people. The experience might have been completely different if I hadn’t decided to follow my intuition and what felt right at the time.
2. Do allow for rest days. I foolishly did not schedule them, and I very nearly had to give up halfway and go home because I had been literally hopping my way for two days on an injured knee and a dangerously infected blister that I had to tend to in hospital. Don’t be me, be a reasonable human being (trust me, it is not a fun experience).
3. Speaking of blisters: take care of these as if your life depended on it. The quality of your trip most definitely does. They are famously the pilgrims’ worst enemies. Some things I learned along the way: do not use hydrocolloid (Compeed-like) plasters. They make things worse. Once you have blisters, what you want is for them to empty, dry and toughen as soon as humanly possible. On that note: do not, under any circumstances, wear no-socks-on closed shoes after taking off your walking boots in the evening (I made that mistake and bitterly regretted it: the blisters never dried and became severely infected). Of course, the best would be to avoid getting blisters altogether, but I am afraid this might be near impossible. I thought my feet were really tough before I started from all the walking, yet after two weeks they were basically one big wet bubble. I don’t know anyone who made it without getting at least some. For prevention, applying Vaseline before putting on socks in the morning, and reapplying on the way every time you feel even the slightest chaffing (seriously, stop and take off your shoes wherever you are, believe me, you do not want to take the risk) works reasonably well. Finally, I discovered that you can get lotions in pharmacies that help toughen and dry the skin if you apply them in the evening before going to bed.
4. Invest in a REALLY GOOD, very comfortable backpack, and buy it in a shop where you can try several on to see which one works best for you. It might sound weird that I’m insisting on this rather than the shoes, but I had a terrible experience with an Osprey backpack which, as it turned out, was not meant for hiking, and I wouldn’t wish that on anyone. To be honest, I took a very silly risk by buying both backpack and shoes online. Don’t be me. Be a reasonable human being, or be prepared to endure a month of bruised collarbones. You are going to spend a lot of time with it, it should be your best friend, not a constant torture. You should also endeavour to make it as light as possible. The Camino is as civilised a hike as it goes and you really don’t need much more than the essential. That’s two t-shirts and two sets of underwear. And some rain stuff.

I could write about the trip for pages and pages. About the breathtaking beauty of the sea and the sense of utter peace it brought me (why I chose the less popular, hillier Camino del Norte), about the diversity of people coming from all kinds of places and backgrounds, and at all stages of life. About the close connections that formed between the old and the young (befriending several retired couples and having eye-opening talks with them was an unexpected delight), about the whimsical and almost magical atmosphere pervading everything Camino-related, and the way it kept ‘providing’ (being given a knee wrap by one of the said retired couples, directions by an old woman standing at a crossroads when I was about to get lost, a bed despite arriving at 9pm, an unexpected free lunch at the very fancy oldest hotel in the world when we were first to arrive at the pilgrims’ office in Santiago, someone picking up my dropped wallet in a forest where I thought I was alone, etc.).

But it wouldn’t do much. I believe everyone experiences the Camino in their own way. What you learn, what you see, who you connect with will be deeply related to who you are. What the Camino does is allowing you to investigate precisely this, away from the usual pressures. The alternation between hot and cold, pain and relief, hunger and nourishment makes you grateful for the smallest things. A breeze. A shower (usually the highlight of the day). Some food. The kindness of strangers. You have space to think about what truly matters to you.

It reminded me of this simple fact:

In the end, having been ‘me’ was always going to be the most important thing I could do.